Friday, September 26, 2014

A splendid read found its way over to The New York Times today, and it has Paul Thomas Anderson speaking out publicly for the first time about his work Inherent Vice.

The piece, among other things, asserts that the notoriously elusive author behind the film, Thomas Pynchon, will actually have a cameo appearance in the picture. PTA remains coy about that fact, while other sources (including Brolin) maintain its truth.

In discussing what drew him to the project, PTA said he had been aspiring to adapt Pynchon for a while.

Years ago, Mr. Anderson considered adapting [Pynchon's 1990 novel] "Vineland," but ultimately couldn't figure out how. When "Inherent Vice" was issued in 2009, he was drawn to it - and wrote the film concurrently with his script for 2012's "The Master."

"I thought, I don't need to make a movie about California in the late '60s, early '70s! Didn't I already do that?" Mr. Anderson said, referring to his 1997 breakthrough, "Boogie Nights," "Well, I didn't. Like gravity, it didn't pull in any but one direction. And I just couldn't help myself."

Todd Heisler/The New York Times

On the process of adapting the novel:

To get a grip on the project, [PTA] adapted the entire 384-page novel sentence by sentence. "I basically just transcribed it so I could look at it like it was a script," he said. "It looked like a doorstop. But I can understand this format. As big as it was, it was easier for me to cut down."

Along with The Long Goodbye, PTA was also inspired by Kiss Me Deadly and The Big Sleep, film noirs whose "plausibility rarely mattered as much as the pleasure of the filmmaking."

“ ‘North by Northwest’?” he said. “Tell me again how he gets to the middle of the field with a plane after him? I can’t. How does he get to Mount Rushmore? I don’t know, but it’s great.”

Mr. Anderson said his adaptation came into focus when he recalled an old quote from “Chandler or Hammett or one of those guys who said the point of a plot in a detective movie is to get your hero to the next girl to flirt with.” After that, he said, his approach became, “When’s the next girl or funny bit going to happen?”

On top of those more formal influences, PTA turned to the sight gags and physical comedy of Zucker Bros. films as a filmic equivalent for the humor in the book.

“I thought,” Mr. Anderson explained, “What’s something I’ve seen that can get close to that amount of great visual information and all these things going on in the frame?”

“ ‘Police Squad!’ and ‘Top Secret!’ are what I clued into,” he said, referring to collaborations by the slapstick maestros David and Jerry Zucker. “We tried hard to imitate or rip off the Zucker brothers’ style of gags so the film can feel like the book feels: just packed with stuff. And fun.”

The piece goes on to verify that musician Joanna Newsom, whom we reported was participating in the film many months ago, is playing the part of Sortilège, also narrating the film. According to the interview, PTA also wrote a new ending for the movie, its biggest difference from the book.

There are some nice quotes from Joaquin Phoenix and Josh Brolin in the piece, as well as PTA discussing the underlying sadness of the material. Read it in its entirety RIGHT HERE.

Wilson Webb

P.S. If you take a wander over to this page, you'll see that information regarding the first trailer for Inherent Vice has been disclosed in Alberta. We've had some correspondence with the ratings board there and can verify that, in Canada at least, the Inherent Vice trailer is very real and runs just over two minutes in length. What we are not quite sure of yet is when or how it will drop. We imagine it will be sooner rather than later.

Wednesday, September 24, 2014

-Above is a pretty groovy illustration from the most recent issue of The New Yorker for a piece about the New York Film Festival, which begins this Friday, September 26. Some critical thinking has led us to conclude that the two blue figures are from Gone Girl while the two green figures are from Inherent Vice.

- The one star of the film that has spoken rather freely about his impressions from the set is Josh Brolin, who plays Bigfoot Bjornsen, of course. He had some interesting things to say in a piece about the film found in The Los Angeles Daily News recently. The bullet points:

"I read the book as fast as I could before I saw Paul, which means I might as well have not read it," Brolin, 46, admits, "I was so confused by the time he came, I was like stuttering through the whole thing. It was like trying to have a meeting after you've taken a bong hit or something.

Brolin describes the story's vibe as something in "Manson territory."

"It's during the time of of the shattering of the ‘Right Stuff’ mentality into whatever revolution that conjures in you, whether that’s the assassinations or the sexual revolution or drugs, all that. It’s that transition," he says.

"This guy Bigfoot is one of the favorite characters I’ve ever played... He’s a guy that, five years earlier, would have looked like one of the ‘Right Stuff’ guys. But because of his refusal to adjust to any future that doesn’t look like he wanted it to look, he’s kind of pathetic.”

"It’s a really circus experience,” Brolin says of the production. “It feels like traveling from city to city and putting together skits. You never really know if it’s going to work when you finally do it. And then if you’re doing something like Pynchon, which just naturally has that structure anyway, it’s sort of double wacky.”

- Last, but certainly not least, The Film Stage has obtained our first look at Reese Witherspoon as Penny Kimball in Inherent Vice. Click below the fold and see at your own discretion.

In talking with filmmaker Bennett Miller about his much-buzzed-about new film Foxcatcher, which earned him the Best Director award at Cannes this year, the conversation turned to another famous winner of that same award.

Miller clearly knows how to work a roomful of media types without acting like a showboater or coming off like a man undergoing a root canal. He's a low-key fellow who sweats the details of his projects. We talked for a bit last weekend, and what he really wanted to talk about wasn't "Foxcatcher" but the drastically limited avenues of shooting on film, and projecting it, in the digital age.

In Toronto Miller told me straightforwardly, "I think we were better off as filmmakers 100 years ago." He does not prefer shooting digitally. He doesn't like the postproduction process as much now. And the clinical crispness of digital projection bugs him.

Miller picked up his iPhone midconversation and started fishing around for some recent texts. Look here, he said. Read these. They were from Paul Thomas Anderson, whose latest film, "Inherent Vice," plays the New York Film Festival next month.

The texts picked up a conversation Miller and Anderson had earlier the same day, about the inferiority of digital. The vitriol came through in every unpunctuated word.

No direct quotes from either PTA or Miller's texts were lifted for the piece, but it would be nice to think they contained emoji equations like these:

Wednesday, September 10, 2014

The New York Film Festival has just released a (dynamite) teaser trailer, via Entertainment Weekly, with footage from the banner films showing there starting this month, and, we'll be damned, they included some actual footage from Inherent Vice.

The trailer, by design, is cut at an extremely fast clip, so the footage belonging to Vice compared to other films is somewhat difficult to discern. Having said that, there is an unmistakable shot of Doc blazing up a joint 5 seconds in, and then a shot of Owen Wilson with a bunch of hippie comrades about to indulge in five extremely large pizzas at 0:51.

Sound off in the comments below with anything else from the film that you notice, or, of course, if you wish to keep your eyes virgin, hold off on watching the trailer altogether.

(Thx @NickSportello)

UPDATE: At 0:41, Doc is knocked over amusingly (albeit quickly) by a cop, and a few of our readers have been kind enough to point out that the pizza shot at the end features cameo roles from members of the band The Growlers. Cool stuff.

Saturday, September 06, 2014

Well, looky here! With just under a month to before the Inherent Vice premiere, the New York Film Festival has just announced that Paul Thomas Anderson will be hosting the sixth edition of "On Cinema", a masterclass in which a filmmaker chooses film selections that they consider influential to their body of work and discusses how it's affected their approach to cinema. PTA's choices for this edition will not be revealed beforehand, but NYFF director Kent Jones assures us that they are "very surprising."

The event will be held on October 5th at 12:30pm at Alice Tully Hall, the day after Inherent Vice's world premiere in the same room. We do not yet know if the event will be recorded for later viewing.

Thursday, September 04, 2014

In an article about forthcoming break out performances, The New York Times has the first official pic of Katherine Waterston as Shasta Fay Hepworth in Inherent Vice, seen above, and some very interesting remarks from Waterston on the nature of the project and the process of working on it. The article reveals that PTA came to an interest in working with Waterston after watching her 2008 film The Babysitters. The remarks do not reveal explicit plot points per se but they may be more suggestive of the film's tone than you'd like to know going in, so read forward at your own discretion:

In Mr. Anderson’s narcotic noir, “Inherent Vice,” set in Los Angeles in 1970 and based on the Thomas Pynchon novel, Ms. Waterston plays Shasta, right, the free-spirited, sensual ex-girlfriend who wakes the mutton-chopped private investigator Doc Sportello (Mr. Phoenix) from his stoner haze. Like a beacon shining through the counterculture’s druggie fog, Shasta bristles with the kind of wild-eyed, visceral energy Doc has self-medicated into oblivion: a romantic embodiment of what might have been, and what might be lost.

“Certainly, this whole film is sort of the smoke clearing after the ‘60s and everyone coming to, wondering what the hell happened,” she said. “There’s a lot of uncertainty on every page of the novel. Is it all in her head? Or not? Is she as afraid as she needs to be? Or not?"

Over at Filler Magazine, Pretty Little Liars veteran Sasha Pieterse dished out some nice comments about her experience working with PTA & co. on Inherent Vice:

"I'm pretty sure I will never have a better character name," laughs Pieterse, who goes on to gush about landing the part of Japonica and working with Anderson, as well as the film's star-studded ensemble cast, including Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon and Josh Brolin. "It was literally a dream to be involved with the movie," she says. "I'm really happy with the part of the film I'm in; I have so many fun scenes...and so many dark scenes."

Elsewhere in the piece, Pieterse goes a bit more in depth about her experience working on the film. These remarks are a slightly spoiler-laden in nature. Read at your own discretion.

Tuesday, September 02, 2014

There's reportedly quite a bit that separates Inherent Vice from the rest of Paul Thomas Anderson's body of work, but one thing it shares with all six of the features preceding it is that the MPAA has deemed it ill-fitting for anyone under the age of 17, dispelling a slightly distressing premonition we had recently.

Inherent Vice has been Rated R, and if the description is any indication, the film has something for everyone: drug use throughout, sexual content, graphic nudity, language, and some violence.
Sounds like this one's got teeth!